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You're right that it would be silly to just find the angle of the line on the chart and zoom off into infinity - but luckily we don't actually have to do that. Serious people who are interested in these kinds of conflicts can actually take the historical context and modern situation into account when doing their extrapolations... it's just that when you do that you tend to arrive at conclusions unpopular with the PMC. Conclusions like "Ukraine has zero chance of winning this war", "The counteroffensive was a massive failure that wasted lots of Ukrainian lives" and "Putin's propaganda is substantially less effective at influencing popular opinion in the west than western propaganda". People have been advocating for peace and negotiation rather than continued conflict because they (correctly) view the continuing bloodshed as futile, and throwing more Ukrainian lives into the blender is just going to make things worse when the fighting comes to an end. If I actually hated Ukrainians, I'd encourage the US military to send them more fancy toys to encourage them to fight to the death in a suicidally quixotic quest to maximise shareholder returns in the US military industrial complex and degrade Russian military capability.
And just to show that I'm serious about these claims, I'll throw 200 USD in monero into escrow with the bet that Ukraine does not regain Crimea and the breakaway republics by the end of hostilities. If I'm just swallowing Putin's propaganda then this is free money sitting on the table, just waiting for you to pick it up and take it. But I will note that I haven't encountered a single person who believes the western propaganda enough to actually put any money on the line - to me it feels remarkably similar to people talking about how awful racism is then moving their children into 90% white suburbs.
People who are not weird Internet guys don't take bets. Betting because you believe something is going to happen is not a normie thing outside a few restricted cases like sports bets, and even then, that's done more out of the hope that one's team will win rather than the belief that they will.
This is like saying "normal people don't run around in animal costumes" at a furry convention.
It's done for fun, the thrill of the risk. And lots of people make bets to resolve a dispute.
Furries claim to be expressing personal preferences, not universal beliefs that apply to everyone.
Maybe if "lots" means "at least 2", but pretty much everyone outside the rationalist bubble would refuse to do so.
Well, he was offering a specific bet to a specific person right here, so it seems fair to point out we're in weird internet people central.
I don't know what to tell you. "At least 2" would be the amount of normies I've personally run into who claim to have made money off of Trump's election. Beyond that "wanna bet?" was the quickest way to resolve a dispute since I was like 10. Granted, people quickly learn not to take such bets unless we were damn sure about the result, but this is exactly what bets are supposed to do in rat-discourse. If you really want to take a jab at rationalists, make fun of them for reinventing something children come up with on their own, and acting like that makes them smart.
No, he wasn't. He was replying to one person, but he wasn't offering the bet to one person, and he explicitly stated that he hasn't "encountered a single person" willing to bet, implying that the failure of people in general to bet shows that they don't think it's true.
For the record, the bet is totally open to everyone on this forum! The offer was made openly way back on the subreddit - to this day there have still been no takers. And yes, the main reason I bring the bet up is to imply that my interlocutors don't actually agree with the position they're espousing in their heart-of-hearts, and I think looking at things with a financial incentive can sometimes produce clearer thinking.
This seems to imply that most people agree with no positions at all.
I find that most people act in accordance with the positions they actually hold. In fact I believe that's the logic behind the idea of "revealed preferences".
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